Chapter 11 Communication Climate PDF

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These are notes from the course Interpersonal Communication from the school year 2015-2016 ...

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Name Anna Friederich

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Chapter 11: Communication Climate Key Terms  Aggressiveness – verbal attacks that demean other’s self concept and inflict psych. pain  Ambiguous response – response with more than one meaning, vague, leaves listener unsure and confused about the intended message  Argumentativeness – presenting and defending positions while attacking others’ positions  Certainty – dogmatically stating or implying that one’s position is correct and other’s ideas are not worth considering, likely to arouse defensiveness  Communication climate – the emotional tone of a relationship between two individuals  Complaining – disagreeing message that directly or indirectly communicates dissatisfaction  Confirming communication – message that expresses caring/respect/value for another person  Controlling communication – messages that attempt to impose an outcome on another person, resulting in defensive response  Defensiveness - attempt to protect a presenting image a person believes is being attacked  Description – messages that describe a speaker’s position without evaluating others  Disagreeing message – message that essentially communicates “you are wrong”  Disconfirming communication – message expresses lack of care/respect/value for another  Empathy – putting self into another’s perspective to better understand them  Equality – type of supportive communication which suggests the sender respects the receiver  Evaluation – message in which sender judges receiver, resulting in defensiveness  Face – image an individual wants to project to the world  Face-threatening acts – behavior that is perceived as attacking an individual’s face/image  Impersonal response – generalizing statements that are disconfirming or superficial  Impervious response – disconfirming response that ignores another person’s communication  Incongruous response – disconfirming response with contradicting messages  Interrupting response – response when other person is not done talking, shows lack of respect  Invitational communication – approach that welcomes others to your pov and express theirs  Irrelevant response – response that has nothing to do with what the other person was saying  Neutrality – defense-arousing behavior in which sender expresses indifference to receiver  Presenting self –image presented to others, may besame/different from perceived/desired self  Problem orientation – supportive style of communication in which communicators work together to solve their problems instead of imposing their problems on the other  Provisionalism – a supportive style of communication in which a sender expresses openmindedness to other’s ideas and opinions  Spiral – a reciprocal communication pattern in which messages reinforce one another  Spontaneity – supportive communication when sender expresses message w/ no manipulation  Strategy – a defense-arousing style in which a sender tries to manipulate or deceive receiver  Superiority – sender states or implies the receiver is inferior  Tangential response – a disconfirming response that uses the speaker’s remark as starting point to switch over to a new subject Activities 1. Review the Gibb behaviors on page 350-356, and then answer the following questions: a. Which defense-provoking behavior do you find most annoying? i. For me, superiority seems to be the worst. No matter what the defenseprovoking behaviors, at least they are talking to you as an equal. In superiority, they talk down to you and your intelligence is suddenly dissed

Name Anna Friederich

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as inferior and then anything you say will be shrugged off as irrelevant. It shuts down conversation, and even if you are equally intelligent in this dialogue, suddenly there is a film dropped in front of you and you’ve been insulted as less intelligent. Who in your life uses that behavior the most often? i. One of my old friends from high school used to do that to me all the time. Anytime I said something silly, or asked any kind of question, she would toss it off as if I wasn’t as intelligent as her and would often just scoff or roll her eyes. Whenever I would try to give her advice, she would tell me I didn’t understand or ignore my perspective because she had pretty much convinced herself that anything I said should not be taken seriously. What part of your presenting self is threatened by that behavior? i. I think part of any person’s presenting self and face involves conveying intelligence, so that definitely threatens that part of my presenting self because it makes me appear dumb. I cannot stand when people treat me that way because it is contagious and that view passes onto other people. How do you normally respond to that behavior? i. I normally scoff back and defend myself or explain it in a more logical reasoning, but sometimes it’s hard to handle it maturely and I often just get frustrated and get aggressive back at them in response. Sometimes in certain contexts they may not be doing it entirely on purpose to be insulting, but it is often easy to tell when they are being rude on purpose. What behavior do you wish that person would use instead? i. If they do not agree with what I am saying, or do not think I entirely understand their situation, then I’d rather them put more effort into explaining themselves so I have a clearer idea than simply shrugging me off as if what I say does not matter.

2. Mental health experts generally believe it is better to have others disagree with you than ignore you. Express your opinion on this matter, using specific examples from personal experiences to support your position. Next, discuss whether (and how) it is possible to disagree without being disconfirming. a. I agree with this, being ignored by parents or close friends and family is said to be one of the most damaging things that can affect children growing up. This offers no acknowledgment, no support, no reasons for the treatment, and really no feedback whatsoever. This leaves children confused and unsure of themselves, typically resulting in shutting themselves off from people. I never experienced this as a child, but I have experienced disagreements many times as I am a pretty opinionated person. Experiencing a disagreement with someone, even though it can be unpleasant or lead to defensiveness and aggression, is better than being ignored because at least their position is being explained and you can attempt to empathize and acknowledge their perspective. There was this guy I liked a lot, so much that I wanted my parents to meet him and get to know him, but after about a year of getting closer he suddenly dropped off and became distant. It was unclear to me why, so my own imagination convinced myself I was not good enough, or he saw something he didn’t like in me. The silence was infuriating, but when we

Name Anna Friederich

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finally ran into each other later we got to talking and he explained he was leaving for Thailand and couldn’t get attached. Even if the reason was lame and I didn’t agree with how he went about it, at least I knew where his mindset was coming from instead of jumping to self-put-down conclusions about myself to try to figure out the reason behind the silence. Another time I experienced being ignored, was one night me and my roommates and neighbors were all outside on our patio smoking cigarettes and drinking late at night, and the conversation turned to religion, which is of course a touchy subject, but as I began explaining my stance I noticed everyone was tuned in except for my roommate Mary. She was scrolling on her phone, completely ignoring me talk. I thought maybe she just didn’t care about what I had to say, and that annoyed me because when someone has opinions on religion or big things like that, it is a poignant characteristic about themselves that they have likely given a lot of thought, so to ignore them and not even listen was so rude. At least times before, when we would get on touchy subjects she would voice her opinion and even if we disagreed on fundamental things, by expressing them, we could find common ground to agree on and examples of each other’s perspective to analyze. Disconfirming messages like being ignored is damaging because the receiver has nothing to work with, and therefore cannot even begin to figure out how to fix the problem if there is one, if it isn’t being discussed. It demonstrates a lack of concern for our needs and ideas, which is worse to our egos than someone simply having different ones. We can constructively disagree with someone, and clearly explain our stances and listen to theirs, and express evidently how we feel about that difference in our opinions. Some disagreements can of course lead to anger, but even anger would tell us how that person feels and we would get to know that person better through that experience. Listening attentively would communicate care about them, and explaining our stances respectfully would get our ideas across more clearly....